


you know it'll never be the same

by heroic



Category: Vicious - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-06-25 16:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15644112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heroic/pseuds/heroic
Summary: “What’s so special about Victor Vale?” / OR: Eli ponders.





	you know it'll never be the same

**Author's Note:**

> posting this before vengeance comes out and makes it entirely implausible, but it's cool. i wrote this back in june when i first read the book and i actually really like it, so i figured i might as well put it out after a bit of editing. i'm just never getting over These Absolutely Awful Boys, it seems
> 
> title from "pay the man" by foster the people

“What’s so special about Victor Vale?” Serena finally asks, her voice curious.

They’re in their Esquire hotel room, the light shining in from the balcony doors, straits of light lining the floor. It spills further in, covering the arm-chair Eli is sitting in with half-light, enough to cut across half his face like a scar. A man half in the light, half in the dark.

He stays very still, like this is where he belongs, still squinting down at the drawing in his hands. It’s crude, with actual human blood, and Eli is taken back when he looks at it— back to the university issue apartment, his suitcase clacking against the floor, the way Victor had looked at him from the doorway, like he was both scrutinizing and memorizing every aspect of him. He can still see the way the blood streaked and smeared against that very same floor, from when he cut his arm wrist to elbow over and over, in awe at what he could do, from where he shot Victor three times knowing he couldn’t feel the pain but wondering if he could feel the impact of the bullets, the weight of the gun in Eli’s hand.

Victor always was better at understanding others, getting inside of them to know what made them tick, but Eli was better at morphing around them, gaining their trust and being what they needed him to be. It’d come in handy these last ten years, but it’d always been a talent of his, a tool to survive even before the experiments and the suicide attempts.

The thing about Victor is that he was happiest when Eli was himself, non-conforming and no fake smile, and that always made Eli feel on edge. He felt raw around Victor, cut open, like he couldn’t hide any secrets, especially the ones he wanted to— and like Victor didn’t even mind. All the gore, all the stains, all the things that God knew but otherwise couldn’t come to light. Victor sat like he was always waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, to see what Eli really was made of, like he liked him better dark.

It made Eli feel both uneasy and relieved, how Victor never shied away from him, how Victor always was a steadying hand, even until the very end.

 _I didn’t rat_   you _out, you know._

Serena voice drifts through the room, almost like it was a rhetorical question. Nothing with Serena ever is. "He's an EO," Eli answers, resisting the urge to let everything else that comes to mind flow out of his mouth. When Serena senses it, she just raises an eyebrow, like she’s not in the mood to play this time around.

“Eli,” she starts again, calm. She is always the most patient when she knows she doesn’t have to wait. “Tell me how you know Victor Vale.”

“He was my college roommate,” Eli drawls. It’s the truth, in its bare essence. What he told to every cop that interrogated him after it all fell away. He’s still studying the drawing, the bold thick lines, the shape of Victor’s drawn mouth when he adds, “My friend.”

Serena frowns, like she can physically feel the defiance in the words, Eli resisting by not saying the whole truth. “That’s all?” She prompts, and Eli can’t blame her, why she can’t possibly understand _why_ his old friend is coming back to try to kill him with her sister like this is a shitty b-roll revenge flick. It sounds juvenile. It sounds ridiculous.

“No,” Eli admits. There are a lot of words he could use to describe him and Victor, Victor and him — co-conspirators, rivals, a light and its shadow, intrinsically linked through cold water and a bottle of pills — but none of it fits just right. None of it feels like it encompasses the entire story, the whole of them. Eli doesn’t know if anyone else could ever understand it, the way they are bound to one another. How ten years hasn’t been enough to sever it.

“We were more than that,” Eli says, smoothing his finger over the blood drops. He remembers watching Victor bleed out, waiting for the cops, and he idly wonders if Victor used his own blood for this, shut his pain off and split his skin open to make a point. He always was dramatic, blotting everything out to leave the most important parts. He always left the parts that he thought mattered most. “But I don’t know what.”

And that, Serena knows, is the truth, so she drops it.


End file.
